How to onboard at a startup vs big tech?

Question

I've worked at meta and stripe but in april I'll be starting a new job at anthropic. At this point i feel comfortable spinning up on new things at large companies where onboarding lasts months and the first couple weeks are just listening to presentations, but anthropic is the smallest company i'll have worked for (~1000 people) and their onboarding plan is a little intimidating. They want me to merge 1-3 diffs in my first week and to be fully spun up after 30 days.

What should i do to really hit the ground running that this new job and start pushing code from the start. I'll be on the growth team which is something im comfortable with since i did growth at meta, so mainly just looking for advice on how to learn a new codebase and company that's much smaller than i'm used to.

Rahul Pandey · Accepted Answer

Woah, you've worked at Meta and Stripe, and now you're joining Anthropic?? 🤯🤯

All three of these are some of the most desirable companies in the world. And Anthropic pays extremely well: https://www.jointaro.com/jobs/?selectedCompanies=Anthropic

I feel like we should be learning from you 😅

I think the goal to merge 1-3 diffs in the first week is great! Your goals with the initial code changes are:

Learn about the process of committing code.
Go through the ritual and interaction of code review, so you create some interaction with your new coworkers.

You should NOT try to make a big, ambiguous change.

I talk about some additional onboarding tips at smaller companies here: Onboarding Tips Within Smaller Companies (although I should call out that 1K employees is not particularly small).

The main thing I'd say for a startup is that a lot of key knowledge will be in the head of certain key people. Your goal is to identify who those people are and talk with them: get their perspective on projects they're excited about, or what problems they are experiencing in the codebase today.

How to onboard at a startup vs big tech?

Discussion